I am going to be working on cancer-related research (gliomas for those of you who are extra curious) starting next semester, in the clinical realm. So I met today with the head of neuro-oncology in the hospital where I will be working. Since most of the work being done was at the clinical cancer center, I went there to meet with him. Turns out he’s pretty busy (go figure), so I ended up waiting in the waiting room for a while.

It was interesting to see how many pleasant faces there were given that, I think, most of the patients there were suffering from brain cancers. I especially enjoyed observing one patient, an elderly man, who was doing nothing but cracking jokes as he waited. He had, in fact, been waiting there for three hours and had traveled from Long Island to the city to meet with his doctor. At one point, he turned to one of the other patients who had been waiting there for a while herself, and asked with near deadpan-delivery, “Do you think that if they make us wait through the night, they’ll give us turkey?” This was an elderly man who couldn’t have been younger than eighty with both a personal nurse and a walker at his side, waiting in a cancer waiting room, asking gleefully about turkey. I loved his attitude, and it made my wait all the more pleasant.

I hope it doesn’t take a death sentence for me to realize that, sometimes, we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff and that we need to understand that there are better things to worry about (like for example, turkey). Sometimes you can find beauty in the madness, and maybe, that’s really all that life’s about.